Many Internet sites, such as Stupeflix and Animoto (commercial names), offer such a service for generating edited films. This service is designed especially for making, with a minimum of interactions for the user, a film of memories that may be different each time, even if the set of memories used remains the same.
Generally, the memories used are media files such as videos, images, audio files or even text files. Of course, any piece of data that can be converted and integrated into a video sequence can be considered within the framework of the creation of video sequences.
The approach that was developed by Animoto and that is described in the publication WO 2008/109233 or US 2008/0215979 makes it possible to generate video miniclips accompanied by music chosen in a catalog.
It provides for the user to load a set of visual media files that will comprise his memories to be edited, and specifies an audio file from which the editing is done. The editing then consists in automatically choosing the video motifs corresponding to a visual rendering for one or more media files, and then in assigning the visual media files to these video motifs.
In detail, several groups of media files can be formed, either by the choice of the user or by image analysis. The video motifs are then selected, group after group, by successive routes through a binary tree of the motifs. This binary tree is based on the “portrait” orientation, called P, or “landscape” orientation, called L, of media files, and stores different available motifs at the level of its nodes.
For one group or for media files remaining to be processed that follow, for example, the following orientation configuration LPLLPLLLLPPPLPLLPL, all of the motifs available to the corresponding nodes, in the example the nodes L, LP, LPL, LPLL, . . . , are considered for determining a better video motif, after weighting calculations and random calculations.
Alignment of these groups on an audio file breakdown according to its rhythm, moreover, makes it possible to obtain synchronization between the visual rendering and the audio rendering of the film that has been edited in this way.
For the user, the main defect is the general slowness of this approach for generating an edited film. This slowness can originate especially from the extensive necessary processing, such as, for example, the route through the binary tree, and the large number of video motifs then obtained from which the weighting calculations and random calculation are made.
Moreover, it could be noted that the rendering of the edited film is not satisfactory for the user. Actually, the coherence of the visual rendering between the displayed media files is not optimum, even while the user could specify it manually or it could be determined by analysis via regroupings of media files.